God Save the Queen (and Europe)

With celebrations across the land for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee ordinary subjects are enjoying their four-day weekend, street parties, fairs and a 1000 boat trip down the Thames. But economists are raining on the Queen's parades, derbies and big Balcony wave.
While the sale of bunting, teacakes, Royal gnomes and everything British are reaching record levels in the run up to the festivities, economists are saying this could prolong the European troubles. While the boost in consumer goods will help a little, the added bank holidays could reduce gross domestic product by .5% this quarter. Last year's Royal Wedding gave the economy a similar dip.This comes at the same time the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe announced the findings of its Mediascope Europe market research study which found nearly 430 million Europeans use the internet, spending an average of 14.8 hours per week. Significantly for merchants, the study of more than 50,000 people found 96% use the internet to research purchases online while 87% make online purchases.

So perhaps Brits will stay home during the four day weekend and shop online keeping the economy from going through a triple dip.

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Pinterest as Market Research

Pinterest as a place for sharing pictures, yes. But for Market Research? Well, yes.
If you don’t know Pinterest, it’s the hugely popular site that calls itself the online pinboard. It’s online social photo-sharing platform. Kaila Strong on Search Engine Watch astutely finds a number of ways to use it for market research. Calling market research social listening, a term I like very much, she says that knowing the kinds of images your customers like is helpful when developing products and putting together a marketing strategy. She looks into four areas where Pinterest can help you start your market research, following the direction of how Pinterest is set up. The site organizes “pins” into categories so a market researcher can look and see the most popular pins, the fonts that people like best, search in areas on the site where they want to launch their next product and see the latest, most popular pins in that area. There is also a gift section, where you can browse through what others (the competition) are doing. You can also see what terms people use to describe items on your current site. And finally you can scan the user boards to understand how your customers like to organize their information, using that insight to organize the navigation on your site. Lots of companies are still struggling with how to incorporate social networking into their sales and marketing strategies. But it is clear that companies can learn a lot about how their customers act based on their use of these sites. Pinterest for Market Research, pin that on your wall.

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Market Research and the Apprentice, UK Style

In the US there is Donald Trump with his hair and New York accent. In the UK the Apprentice is run by Alan Sugar, with his light beard and British accent.

Sugar's main impact on the UK has been the creation of his company Amstrad, a consumer electronics company and his involvement in the Tottenham Hotspur football team which after a poor 16 year run, he sold his interest.

During a recent episode of the Apprentice, which appears to be identical to the US show, the teams are attempting to create a new consumer product. So they go through their various iterations until it's time to conduct their market research. The market research says to do one thing, but they ignore it, going another way.

Guess who gets fired for not listening to the market research...

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A New Face on MarketResearch.com

It was 2007 when Iran’s nuclear ambitions became a top story, the mortgage crisis started to hit and Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone.  It was also the year MarketResearch.com launched the last iteration of its website. Until Now.



This month MarketResearch.com launched its newest website with a bold new design, friction-free processing, more content, improved navigation, better support and social networking tools.

Since we first launched MarketResearch.com in 2001 our work has centered on helping companies find the market research they need. Over time we have continued to re-design the site with new and better browse functionality aiding the user in their quest to answer their most pressing business issues with the finest market research, most intuitive design features and the best search engine.

As with any technology, there is no destination, it is a constantly twisting journey. But our goal is get the searcher closer to the content than anyone, and Marketresearch.com is uniquely positioned to do that. Most aggregators present only the abstract and table of contents. MarketResearch.com has the whole report in our database so we can dig deeper for the client before they buy.

We make 10,000 customers a year happy. Try out the new site and you could be customer 10,001.

Put me in Coach

The business of business coaches is not just a new agey fad for profitable companies. The theory goes that everyone needs a coach, whether you’re a professional baseball player or golfer, salesperson or CEO. But in a down market a coach can look to a board of directors like a luxury and it gets cut along with the T&E budget.


According to a report by MarketResearch.com partner IBIS, while the industry experienced a downturn, along with most of the world between 2008 and 2010, the business coaching industry has rebounded nicely with growth coming last year and projected going forward.

When coaching gets cut companies look inside for help, often straining human resources and other departments.

At Marketresearch.com we have found the use of a business coach incredibly useful and a source of insight that can only come from outside the company walls.

A middle ground is sometimes found in online training courses, which will give the industry a shot in the arm.

The report suggests a less than one percent decline for the $9 billion market, up and through 2012, however, a nearly 5% growth rate is expected as a stronger economy pushes ahead.

The highly fragmented market is eating a bit of its own with smaller operators closing down or being bought by the bigger ones with the number of companies in the space declining 1% in the five years preceding and up to 2012.

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More Content, More Content, More Content

MarketResearch.com and Profound -- A Joint Effort

Since bringing MarketResearch.com and Profound together a few years ago, our goal has been a combined database that does two things: 1) Adds more market research content to Profound; 2) Loads the research reports onto Profound, faster.

This became a reality in 2012 when we added 40% more market research publishers to the Profound cache of more than 600,000 documents.



This was an effort of not just contracts and publishers. It was also a feat of technology advancement. Prior to this process all content loaded to Profound had to go through a long manual process, as opposed to Marketresearch.com, where the loading is technology driven.

By combining the databases and altering certain slicing procedures, all content is loaded up on Profound faster and more seamlessly than before, giving Profound users unrivaled access to the content they need to make their toughest business decisions.

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A New Business Approach

The first quarter of 2012 will go down as Profound's best quarter for new business since we acquired the company. Why is that?

There are two trends in this improving, yet still difficult, economy. First, companies are still spending slowly, so slices are an attractive price point option.

But a more important trend is an ever-increasing approval process above a certain price-point. More companies are clamping down on orders of a certain size, lowering the price threshold and making it harder for companies to make quick buying decisions.

This second trend is convincing more companies that buying by the slice is the way to get the information they need in a competitive and cost-saving environment.



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